l86 RAG-TIME AND TANGO
eyes; and you may find it any morning in your newspaper
at Buenos Aires. What is more, there are two of them—
two English dailies without a word of any foreign language
(except the misprints) and an agreeable tendency to be-
labour one another in thegrand manner of British journalism.
Theyserve an English world that moves sedately up and down
between the office and its garden in the outskirts, taking
lunch at the English Club or (on Saturdays) at Harrods,
where the southern skies look down upon a splendid replica
of Brompton Road. Outlying readers unfold their copies a
day late on the shaded porches of cstancias under the
mountains, and the listening Ancles hear the latest from
Lingfield. For Argentina is, perhaps, the one foreign
country in the world where England has made herself
thoroughly at home. That is the paradox of Buenos Aires.
II
But is it such a paradox ? There has been almost from
the beginning an odd convergence of the two countries and
their people. In the days when Argentina was a slightly
restive Spanish colony and Napoleon dragged her mother-
country limply in the wake of France, British eyes were
turned towards the River Plate. For Spain went to war
with England, and Spanish colonies became objects of
interest to Whitehall. British ministers listened with
polite attention to political exiles, who appeared in Downing
Street with perfect manners, airs of mystery, and inter-
minable plans of attack on distant territories of legendary
wealth and inadequate defences. The British Empire had
been very largely put together from the former colonies of
such European states as were rash enough to go to war with
England; and if Spain chose to join the French, there
was no reason why this agreeable process should not be
repeated. So dapper gentlemen in uniform bent over
remarkably misleading maps of South America, Sir Arthur
Wellesley, just home from India and commanding a brigade